Anybody Remotely Interesting is Mad (The Chase)

The Daleks realize the difficulty of fighting a monsterwho does not so much roll natural 20s as is a natural 20.

Hello. There's a lot of you reading this post right now, and I can't figure out where you're all coming from. Would anyone mind letting me know? I'm just curious. Thanks. Hope you enjoy.

It's May 22, 1965. Number one is going to pass among four artists for the next six weeks - Jackie Trent, Sandie Shaw, The Hollies, and Elvis. So, basically, a melange of pop acts. Which is once again fitting for Doctor Who, which airs The Chase, a story that is, basically, a melange of set pieces punctuated by occasional Dalek attacks.

Let's start by being honest here. There are, two my mind, two ways to read this story. Either it's a flawed but mostly edgily brilliant piece of early post-modernism, or it's a complete crap-fest.

I won't lie and pretend the latter case is not, on paper, stronger. Terry Nation is, in many ways, a tough writer to love. He parlayed his brief description of some robotic monsters into copyright on one of Doctor Who's two most iconic images, managing to run roughshod over Ray Cusick, who was the one who changed Nation's description into an iconic design. Nation is credited whenever the Daleks appear on screen. Cusick... isn't. On top of that, of Nation's many Doctor Who scripts, it's a braver man than I who can argue that several do not feel phoned in. Not the least of them this story's most obvious antecedent, The Keys of Marinus.

On the other hand, Nation was able to put together Genesis of the Daleks, rightly considered one of the best Doctor Who stories ever. And it's basically impossible to argue that he is anything less than one of the most influential creative figures in Doctor Who history. Looking even at his three stories prior to this, we can see that it was Nation who introduced the capture/escape sci-fi model, the Doctor's love of pioneers, genre juxtaposition, and, of course, monsters. And that's the root problem with Terry Nation. He's a genius who is perfectly willing to be a hack instead.

So with this story, it's genuinely tough. Because I do think there's a reading to be had that mostly makes this story work and work quite well. I'm also very much uncertain that this reading has anything to do with anything that Nation or anyone else involved with this story had in mind at the time.

Still, this blog is not about reviewing stories in the context of their time (there's been enough quality writing on Doctor Who that does that, most notably Miles and Wood's sublime About Time sextet). It's about understanding a story of Doctor Who that continues to this day. And the version of The Chase that I can bring myself to quite enjoy is a version that seems to me to have been tremendously influential on, say, The Stolen Earth/Journey's End. And even if, on paper, it seems more probable that this is a warmed over piece of hackery from Nation that got maimed by Richard Martin when it was directed... maybe they were just ahead of their time.

So here's the key to The Chase's redemption. Narrative collapse. By which I mean that the Daleks, in The Chase, are not merely threatening to exterminate the Doctor and his companions. The Daleks are threatening to completely destabilize the entire narrative foundations of Doctor Who, and The Doctor has to figure out a way to stop them.

This is established quickly in the opening episode. The first ten minutes are occupied by the TARDIS crew operating the Time-Space Visualizer picked up at the end of The Space Museum. As explained here, the visualizer is a time television, allowing them to watch any historical event on television. So we get ten minutes of the TARDIS crew watching TV instead of having adventures, culminating in a bizarre sequence of Ian dancing to The Beatles "Ticket to Ride." (The Beatles make their sole Doctor Who appearance here via a tape made from Top of the Pops - although it appears that the Beatles were all in favor of it, and in fact a photo of John Lennon chilling with a Dalek exists and is easily Googled. Note, however, that Vicki expresses surprise that the Beatles played classical music - in other words, as mod and hip as the Beatles may be in 1965, Vicki is way, way hipper.)

This, needless to say, destabilizes the narrative considerably. It is, in fact, basically the end of Doctor Who, as a concept. If the TARDIS crew can simply watch the universe on television, why voyage into danger? Indeed, the Time-Space Visualizer effectively reduces the TARDIS crew to the same position occupied by the viewer - watching events on television. Thus the first ten minutes are not, as they might appear, a kind of boring stretch of nobody doing anything, but rather a significant challenge to the entire structure of the show.

Especially when one realizes that the TARDIS crew is contrasted with the Daleks, who have developed time travel themselves. I'm going to talk about the Dalekmania craze next week, but suffice it to say for now that the Daleks were massively popular, readily rivaling the show itself at this point. And now, in the opening episode, the Daleks have literally usurped the show. The TARDIS crew is sitting around watching television, and the Daleks are adventuring in time and space. The Daleks have even gotten to where they break into a mass chorus affirming the last line of their orders, leading to the first really classic moment of Daleks sitting around screaming "EXTERMINATE!"

This continues as the TARDIS crew heads out onto Aridius and... sit around sunbathing. Ian and Vicki go and wander, while the Doctor sunbathes with Barbara in a nice throwback to the old Doctor/Barbara scenes we haven't really seen much of this season. But they don't do anything. It's not until they see the Daleks on the Time-Space Visualizer - by which point, as the Doctor points out, the Daleks must already be on Aridius, since the Visualizer just sees the past - that they actually do anything.

In other words, the show opens by having us be more inclined to sympathize with the Daleks, who are actually giving us a plot, than with the TARDIS crew, who are painfully boring. But in the very end, this inverts again and we are reminded that the Daleks, awesome as they may be, are still a force of narrative collapse.

Way back in The Dalek Invasion of Earth I talked about how the cliffhanger at the end of the first episode is a matter of delayed gratification. We know the Daleks are coming, and so the episode of withholding them finally pays off with the iconic shot of one emerging from the Thames. The first cliffhanger of The Chase is superficially similar, with a Dalek emerging from the sand. Except that there is no delayed gratification. The Daleks are all over this episode prior to the one that rises from the sand. So instead, the cliffhanger is nothing more than a 25 second shot of a Dalek, which we've already seen tons of this episode. There's no pleasure to be had - it's just a rote recitation of standard narrative beats. The episode even mocks this, by having the Dalek cough and grunt as it works its way out of the sand. Even the Dalek knows it's stuck in a rubbish cliffhanger. And this is the central threat of The Chase. The possibility of the entire narrative structure of Doctor Who collapsing.

You'll also recall, in comparison to the last Dalek story, that the Daleks' plan made no sense at all, and appeared to involve driving a hollowed out Earth around the galaxy as a sort of space Volvo. I didn't make much of the bizarreness then, largely because the point of the story wasn't why the Daleks were invading the Earth, it was that they were - to have a completely bizarre explanation only highlighted the fact that story was really just about the setpiece of Daleks in London. Take that logic further for The Chase.

The entire story, as we find out in the second episode, is based on a chase through time. Now, if you're sitting there thinking "But wait, Phil, a chase implies a time gap between pursuer and pursued. If the chase is through time, why doesn't the pursuer just nip forward a few minutes and catch them" then congratulations - you have identified the gapingly obvious flaw in this story that everybody else who has seen it has also mentioned. The story makes no sense at all and has a completely incoherent view of time travel. Which, to be fair, so does Doctor Who, where you can't rewrite history, not one line, at least, not on Earth. But even Barbara, who is usually quite good at this sort of thing, has a rough time keeping a straight face as this bit of exposition is spat out at her.

No. What The Chase is, ultimately, is a story about dropping the Daleks into existing stories and watching them screw everything up. The second episode, thus, is on the one hand a story about the problems of the desert planet Aridius, where the native Aridians are helpless against the Mire Beasts. The Aridians are classic Web Planet-esque presentationalist monsters - in fact, they seem in some ways directly modeled on the Menoptra. Except instead of that story, we get Daleks. (Including the best double entendre the show has had yet. Ian: Barbara, give me your sweater. Barbara: What, again? Ian: It's not for me, it's for the Dalek!) And so that story never happens.

Instead, we quickly jump to another story, in which the TARDIS crew ends up on top of the Empire State Building confronting a country bumpkin from Alabama (played by Peter Purves, who will be appearing again in a few episodes). This sequence is the easiest to criticize in the story. It's slow, not that funny, and seems pointless. There are a couple of interesting bits - most notably when Vicki suggests that New York has been completely destroyed by her time. But mostly, it's tough to love.

Even here, though, I think we can make something out of it. Most significantly, there's the fact that our Alabama yokel assumes that the TARDIS and the Daleks are from the movies. Because apparently America is all about the movies. But again, we can parse something pretty good out of this, in that the Daleks are explicitly threatening basic storytelling. The joke, after all, is that Morton Dill doesn't realize that he's already in a fictional story. The TARDIS isn't from the movies, it's from the telly.

Nowadays, of course, this sequence would end with the Daleks arriving after the Doctor leaves and exterminating Morton Dill. And, let's be honest, it would have been a better ending. Its absence when a modern audience can see clearly that it's "supposed" to be there is probably the thing that makes this sequence the hardest. But you can still see what they're trying to do here.

A quick side comment, incidentally, about the completely nutso Dalek ship that is being used - named by fans as the DARDIS. The inside of it feels like an Austin Powers movie, with tons of big spirally things swirling about in mod/psychedelic patterns. It's another thing that makes clear the underlying tension. The show has, over the last few episodes, explicitly allied itself with youthful culture. But the Daleks are part of that culture too. This is why they're more than just monsters - they're fundamental threats to the narrative structure.

Next up we get one of the oddest sequences in the story. Basically, the TARDIS crew lands on a boat, then leaves, then the Daleks land and everyone on the boat is scared into jumping off in a mass suicide. And here the story seems to just have no idea of what it's doing. The mass suicide is played for comedy - the Daleks trip off the boat, and there's slapstick shots of a woman jumping overboard holding her baby. On other hand, it's a sequence of mass suicide in which a woman jumps overboard holding her baby. And after the Daleks go, we get a lengthy series of pans around the empty boat before we finally learn that it's the Mary Celeste - that these people really are dead, and dead because the Daleks fell into their world.

And it's a horrible, awkward, upsetting moment that the story completely swallows as a narrative beat, refusing to give the audience the room to be upset that they want. The collapse, in other words, is accelerating as the Daleks close in. The story is coming apart at the seams here. We've gone from having no adventure because the TARDIS crew has decided to watch television instead to having no adventure because we no longer have a world that even makes sense.

Which brings us to episode four, which seems to me the most misunderstood episode of the lot. Most commentary on the episode inexplicably assumes that the end reveal - that it takes place in a haunted house in an amusement park - is known throughout. But watching the actual episode makes it clear that this final revelation is meant to be exactly that - a final revelation.

In fact, through most of the episode one assumes the audience is going to be trying to figure out what sort of story they're in. After all, the last episode was a comedy that ended with a mass suicide, and the one before that a fairly standard Doctor Who sci-fi. This story is genre-hopping like mad, so when they land in a seemingly haunted house, we the audience don't know what to do. (Ian, however, quickly notes that there are stairs, which should be useful with the Daleks. I bet you didn't think that joke would show up this early in the series.)

In fact, most of this episode plays on exactly that aspect - the fact that the audience is going to be guessing what sort of show they're watching. So when the Doctor suggests that they are inside the collective unconscious and that's why Dracula and Frankenstein are attacking them, it seems plausible. After all, we've been everywhere else.

Then from there we get the insane spectacle of the Daleks inadequately fighting off Frankenstein and Dracula while the TARDIS crew escapes and we get the pan back to learn it was just a haunted house. But by the time we get that explanation, it already doesn't make sense - how on Earth is a carnival haunted house going to fight off Daleks as successfully as it does? So in this story, the narrative undercutting has sped up to the point where sense is no longer even possible.

Here another dramatic moment that would have worked better today comes up. Vicki is apparently left behind in the haunted house. However, the audience gets to see her sneaking onto the Dalek ship before they see the TARDIS crew react. In other words, the TARDIS crew being horrified and upset that Vicki is missing comes after the audience knows she's all right. Especially in a story like this that seems to be throwing out the rules, it would have been a powerful scene to withhold Vicki's survival. But alas, the show avoids that.

(It is also at this point in the story that it is made explicit that the Daleks believe the Doctor to be human. I mention this mostly because it's another massive blow to any and all attempts to provide a coherent history of the Daleks.)

Instead, we get a robot duplicate of the Doctor, played by Edmund Warwick as a reward for his stepping in and doing some scenes in a wig as a fake Hartnell when he was injured in The Dalek Invasion of Earth and had to miss an episode. The problem is that Warwick looks nothing like the Doctor, and that the evil duplicate is still voiced by Hartnell and played by Hartnell in close-ups. Warwick only plays him in medium and long shots.

This is the cliffhanger leading into Episode 5, The Death of Doctor Who. Now it's certainly possible to take this as one of several pieces of evidence that the Doctor's name is actually Doctor Who (more on this later). But it also seems like a meta-commentary on the story thus far. Episode 5 is where the narrative structure of Doctor Who is directly threatened.

This episode takes place in the jungles of Mechanus - a weird, alien place that evokes Vortis in its hostility. And we get a fairly typical runaround with the TARDIS crew and the robot duplicate. Finally, Ian gets the chance to fight the robot duplicate, and, crucially, gets it wrong, fighting the Doctor instead. The robot duplicate implores Ian to bash the Doctor over the head with a rock, and Ian goes to do it when Barbara (who has already had a fantastic scene arriving on Mechanus and giving a sense of genuine wonder and fear - through all she's seen, she has lost none of her sense of awe) realizes that Ian has the wrong guy.

Now the question is, is this a deliberate callback to 100,000 BC where the Doctor nearly brains a caveman. If so - and I am inclined to say that it is - it's the dramatic turning point of the show, because it is where Barbara asserts baldly that the show has changed and evolved. The Doctor can now be identified precisely because he wouldn't engage in the same behavior that, a year and a half ago, he did. The TARDIS crew escapes this one not just by walking into the TARDIS before the Daleks get in their way (as they did their last three situations) but by changing the rules. This is, dramatically speaking, crucial, because it sets up the last act.

The cliffhanger between episodes 5 and 6 is a straightforward one. A new alien race appears - the Mechanoids. A Mechanoid, as it happens, basically looks like a d20 with a flamethrower. But we can see that the show proposes them as a major monster for the simple reason that their unveiling is a cliffhanger. (Once again, the narrative coding of Dalek Invasion of Earth is crucial to understanding this story.)

The thing is, in episode 6, it's quickly clear that the Mechanoids are rubbish and everyone knows it. (Well, except Nation) The episode opens with a hilarious shot of a Mechanoid and the TARDIS crew in an elevator, with the TARDIS crew crowded to the edges and clearly uncomfortable at the space-hogging Mechanoid. Followed by them walking out into the Mechanoid city and gasping "It's huge!"

The next shot after that is an obvious model shot. And it's impossible not to laugh at the contrast. Shortly thereafter we get a 35 second scene of two Mechanoids talking. Which amounts to them bleeping unintelligibly. The Mechanoids, in fact, are among the most incoherently speaking monsters we've ever seen. And the show is clearly mocking them - in fact, Barbara and Vicki even get in on the Mechanoid-mocking action.

After a quick meet-up with Steven (played again by Peter Purves), a marooned pilot with a stuffed panda he keeps at all times, we go into another burst of plot. The Doctor sets the Daleks up the bomb, leading to what is easily the best Dalek moment we have ever seen, beating out even the crowdsurfing of Dalek Invasion of Earth, as a Dalek spins around the room for an extended period of time shouting "AM EXTERMINATED! AM EXTERMINATED!" Meanwhile, Ian, Barbara, and the Doctor have to blindfold and tie up a screaming and protesting Vicki to lower her down a rope out of the Mechanoid city, providing what I am sure is some very disgusting fanboy's dream.

Meanwhile, in the Mechanoid city, the director, Richard Martin, serves up a truly amazing fight scene. The direction is often flagged as the weak point of this story, and it's a fair cop - Martin picks some truly terrible camera angles throughout, and does feel a bit over his head. But the final fight between the Mechanoids and the Daleks is fantastic. Starting with a montage, the sequence cuts faster and faster, and then begins overlaying multiple scenes until it is no longer able to be parsed by the viewer and is just a blur of fire and ray gun effects. And this is telling. In the end, narrative resolution comes when the TARDIS crew decides "the hell with this" and runs off, leaving the Daleks to fight the ill-conceived Mechanoids. The TARDIS crew has nothing to do with defeating the Daleks. They just waited around until another monster arrived and slipped out the back while the narrative restabilized itself. And in the end, it's nothing to do with Doctor Who that saves the narrative, but rather with the Daleks who, despite being terrifying conquerers of the universe, ultimately are just another silly robot.

But here's the thing - which is crucial about narrative collapse storylines like this. The narrative can be restored. That's the whole point of Doctor Who in these narrative collapse stories - that ultimately there is no such thing as threatening the fundamental narrative logic of Doctor Who because, eventually, it just shrugs its shoulders and does something random to get out of it.

But there's a flip side. The narrative restoration always comes at a price. The Doctor can get out of anything, but the flip side is that he is always going to be alone. The Doctor's fundamental move - the first trick we ever saw him do - was to fall out of the world. To escape. But when you escape, you are, in the end, alone.

And so, in a sickening collapse, we go from the TARDIS crew joking around (including Ian pretending to be a Dalek) to Ian and Barbara realizing they can use the DARDIS to get home. And it's clear, under a careful reading, that this is, ultimately, because of the Daleks destabilizing of the narrative. Because on the Empire State Building, they were there in their own time - closer to home than they'd ever been - and they made no effort to get out of the TARDIS and go home. But now, as soon as they see the DARDIS, they realize that they want to go home.

Now, as I've said, I'm not confident in my reading up to this point. The story really might just be a silly mess. But from here on out, I'm rock solid confident. Because Ian and Barbara's departure is brilliant. The only question is whether it's a brilliant scene at the end of a rubbish story, or a brilliant culmination of a brilliant story.

As soon as Ian and Barbara mention wanting to go home, the Doctor loses it. He reverts to the sort of childish anger we haven't seen from him in ages - the raw crankiness of the Doctor who might bash someone's head in, and who sabotages his ship to force his companions to explore. He screams at them. He rails at them.

And here we see what a great TARDIS crew we've had for the past six stories. Barbara sells it. Flattering the Doctor and begging him at once, as she was always the best at doing, she tells him openly and honestly how much traveling with him has meant to her. But also that, unlike him, they have a home to go to, and they want to go there. And it's a heartbreakingly beautiful scene.

And then there is Ian. I've been down on Ian in the past, to the point where Simon Guerrier, who wrote The Time Travellers, has called me absurdly wrong on the point. I still think there are some major problems with Ian - most notably that he's the exact sort of manly action hero that the show usually sends up a bit. Which is why you have him with ridiculous scenes dancing to the Beatles and pretending to be a Dalek - because he is faintly absurd, and the show knows it.

He's also hampered by the fact that his character isn't one we recognize in Doctor Who anymore. He's the companion who least gets to react to the strangeness of the world around him, which leads to the sort of one-note acting I've previously complained about. He's stoic in a way that Doctor Who avoids later. But there is one later companion that Ian is a clear inspiration for, in a weird way, and that character is the one that, I think, can give a clear lens on how to read Ian as a great character. And that's Wilf.

It's clear from a couple of points throughout his time on the TARDIS that Ian served in the military. If he's the same age as William Russell, that would put him in World War II, and about the same age as Bernard Cribbins and thus Wilfred Mott. They are, in other words, characters with very similar origins. But where Wilf has stayed on Earth and been passed by, becoming a quiet, respectful patriot who looks at the stars, Ian got to go there. They are, essentially, the same character, and had Ian never traveled on the TARDIS, he'd have grown old to be Wilf. And if you can project that backwards and look at Ian that way, you can see the noble bearing and quiet dignity that was bottled up torturously in Wilf allowed out. When, years down the line, Wilf chokes back tears while begging the Doctor to take Donna with him, because "she was better with you" (in an episode whose structure owes more than it would like to admit to the reading of The Chase above), the subtext is that Wilf, too, would have been better with the Doctor. And in Ian, we can see exactly what he means. Ian is a better person for traveling on the TARDIS. He was always a good man, but the Doctor gave him the opportunity to be a great one, and one senses he will never go back.

And then there is Vicki, who is a few stories away from an unceremonious writing out largely because she allied with Hartnell against the new producer. Vicki, who in this scene, does what Susan never could. She stands up to him. She tells him to let them go. And she does so lovingly. Loving the Doctor as a man. Not in a creepy sexual way, but also not in the paternal way that Susan loved him. There are shades of Lewis Carol and Alice Liddell. Which is still an unnerving relationship. The Problem of Susan has not gone away. But that's another story.

In the end, we are denied the actual goodbye between Ian and Barbara. Which is a beautiful decision. But instead, we get something better. Ian and Barbara ride off into the sunset, returning to beautiful, contemporary, swinging London. There's a great bit where Ian is momentarily terrified by... a police box. Because they have returned to our world, full of joy and wonder. This is the completion of a story arc, done better than we will see it done for almost a decade.

And as the episode ends, we pull back and see the Doctor, now watching his friends on the Time-Space Visualizer. The natural order of things is restored. Now the Doctor watches us on television, just as we watch him. And as the episode ends, the Doctor at last, for the first time, admits that he will miss them.

This, I should note, is why one of the few continuity points I am a bit fascistic about is that there are basically no pre-Unearthly Child stories. I mean, you can give the Doctor one or two adventures, but there's no real way to say that he traveled substantially before that. Because if you compare this Doctor, choking up with sorrow at losing his friends, to the one who, when caught in the Cave of Skulls in 100,000 BC, just gives up, it is clear that Ian and Barbara have changed the Doctor. Being with them has made him into a hero. And if you give him adventures before he meets them, you cheat them of that story role. I'm fine with retcons and contradictions in continuity, but I'm loathe to accept one that actively invalidates the emotional core of another story. And giving Ian and Barbara any position at all beyond the two people who taught the Doctor to be a hero cheapens them. Watching these first sixteen stories, it is clear that they are not just the first companions for the viewer, they are the first companions for the Doctor.

And he misses them.

He'll miss others. This sense of loss is essential to the show. But to everyone who complains that they miss Rose, or Donna, or any other later companion, remember this:

It is June 26, 1965. The Hollies are at #1 with "I'm Alive." And we miss Ian and Barbara. More even than Susan, whose absence was, ultimately, for her own good and the Doctor's own good. This is the first departure to truly hurt. 46 years later, it still hurts. And if, in 2052, Doomsday turns out to have had the staying power of this last scene, maybe then we can talk about how much you miss Rose. Assuming that, 87 years later, we've stopped missing Ian and Barbara.

Ah, The Gunfighters. I'm actually looking forward to that one, in no small part because it seems that recent fan opinion has finally started to swing away from the Peter Haining orthodoxy that declared The Gunfighters the worst-ever story, and in fact most people these days seem to regard it as superior to The Celestial Toymaker.

I am totally with you on the missing Barbara. I just started watching the show from the very beginning, and Barbara immediately stood out to me as one of the remarkable companions. I knew "The Chase" was the serial where she would make her exit, and I have been dreading it. While I have only seen the modern companions and the first 5 of the early years, I think Barbara may long last as one of my all-time favorites. She brings a groundedness to everything that I think really elevates the show and the other characters around her. Her and Ian's departure and the Doctor's reaction to it really reminded me of the 10th Doctor's line from "The Next Doctor": "They leave. Because they should or because they find someone else. And some of them, some of them... forget me. I suppose in the end, they break my heart." I never realized how long that had been true for the Doctor until Ian and Barbara left.

That "classical music" quip always struck me as just bizarrely nonsensical. How can Vicki have heard of them at ALL, let alone visited their memorial theater, without having some idea what kind of music they are famous for? That's some hacktastic writing right there.

As for Ian and Barbara, I loved them both dearly. Ian-Babs-Vicki are still one of my all time favorite TARDIS crews, not least because Barbara, at least, is one of the few times the show has ever gotten an "ordinary person" character so, so right.

"Now the question is, is this a deliberate callback to 100,000 BC where the Doctor nearly brains a caveman. If so - and I am inclined to say that it is - it's the dramatic turning point of the show, because it is where Barbara asserts baldly that the show has changed and evolved. The Doctor can now be identified precisely because he wouldn't engage in the same behavior that, a year and a half ago, he did."

I was just rereading this entry in your book because I rewatched The Chase today, and I think this is a bad misreading of the scene -- it's when the duplicate Doctor calls Vicki "Susan" that Barbara backs away. It's not him wanting to kill what is, after all, a robot (robots normally being fair game in Doctor Who), but him not knowing that Vicki isn't Susan, because the Daleks have only programmed the duplicate with the information they knew from the previous adventures.

It took me a while but I figured out a way this line makes sense. Vicki *has* heard the Beatles before, but not the song she's hearing now. The Beatles did a lot of different things with their music despite being mainly remembered as early rock-n-roll- evidently some of those things have been built on and incorporated into what modern-day music is like in Vicki's future, but others have been relegated to the past and designated as "classical". The former make up most/all of what Vicki as a future citizen knows about the Beatles, because as time goes on popular culture forgets lots of things but hangs on to what it considers extraordinary, so when she encounters the latter in the form of "Ticket to Ride", she's surprised to find that the Beatles weren't all (future levels of) cool, all the time.It's like finding a relaxed, comedic beach episode in the middle of an action-packed cartoon series, or a purely romantic novel in the bibliography of your favorite horror writer- it's not that your opinion of the entire body of work changes, just that you become aware that the body of work extends beyond what you knew about.